GPS was a wonderful invention she thought as she parked her car in front of Arthur DeLoach's three-story home in historic Charleston. It amazed her that with a compass and a map she could roam the wilderness and never get lost, but put her in the city and she'd get turned around almost every time. And to make matters worse, she'd grown up in Charleston. Now all she had to do was input the address and the electronic device guided her to his mailbox with voice commands. She grabbed her bag and walked to the doorstep. No doorbell to announce her arrival, only a brass knocker on the oversized wooden door. She reached for the knocker but before she could grab it the door opened. A middle-aged black woman stood in front of her, almost as if she had been waiting for her to arrive. Might have even been sizing her up as she walked to the front door.
"Hello. I'm Ashley Regan."
"Ms Regan, Mr. DeLoach is expecting you. May I take your bag, ma'am?"
"No, thank you. I'll keep it. It's carrying the item I brought for Mr. DeLoach."
The old house had a musty odor with twelve-foot ceilings, large oriental rugs in every room, and a long hallway extending from front to back in the center of the home. A stairway led upstairs in the middle of the main hallway. "How old is this house?" Regan asked.
"Over two hundred years. It was built in 1811." The woman explained. "Out back are the gardens and a carriage house. The carriage house was built in 1813."
Regan followed the woman down the long hallway to a closed door near the back of the home. Every inch of wall space, it seemed, was covered with paintings. Cabinets and display cases full of antiquities that appeared to have come from every corner of the world. Through the rear windows she could see the gardens full of assorted flowers, most in full bloom, and the old carriage house.
The woman knocked twice then opened the door and walked in.
"Mr. DeLoach, Ms. Regan is here to see you." The woman turned to her. "Go on in, honey, and talk loud, he's hard of hearing."
As Regan walked in, the woman closed the door behind her. The room was full of equipment some of it small, some not so small. She had no idea how any of it worked, nor did she really care. Next to a wall was a large table with different colored vials of what she assumed were chemicals, a large magnifying glass with a light mounted under the rim illuminating a book that lay across the center of the table, and standing at the table, an old man wearing jeweler's glasses and white gloves.
"Mr. DeLoach, I'm Ashley Regan. We spoke on the phone."
The old man held up his hand. "Shh. I'll be with you in a moment." He sounded angry and impatient. "Have a seat. And I'm not hard of hearing so you don't have to yell. Zula Mae tells everyone that so she can listen through the door."
She smiled at the thought of a nosy housekeeper, found a chair next to a window, and sat down.
Regan guessed Arthur DeLoach was in his seventies, perhaps as old as eighty. His gray hair was thin, long, and scraggly. His old hands showed signs of arthritis induced deformity but they seemed steady when he worked. His shoulders had a permanent hunch and he shuffled when he walked. She realized he wasn't angry or gruff, his voice just made him seem that way.
"So Ms Regan, what do you have for me?"
She was on. Time for the lies to begin.
"Mr. DeLoach, my Uncle William Franks, my mother's brother, died a couple of months ago, and since I was the only relative left, I was named executor of his estate. When I went to clean out his house I found this." She pulled out the book in the plastic bags. "It was frozen in the back of a freezer in his garage. Years of frost had accumulated on it. I know this sounds odd, but my uncle was an odd man. A bibliophile…his house is full of books. I don't know where I'm going to put all of them. As the frost melted, I suspected this might be his personal journal so I wrapped it up and put it back in my freezer until I could find someone to safely restore it. It has his initials on the binding and some sort of crest. Maybe a family crest, I don't know. My uncle grew up in Germany, Bavaria I think. Also there's a hole punched through it and some sort of stain…I don't know what happened to cause that."
There. Her story complete. Her lies told. She designed her story to cover all the bases and hopefully deflect any suspicion the old man might have.
"May I hold the book?" DeLoach held out his old arthritic hand.
She placed the book in his hand. He held it up to the light, pulled his jeweler's glasses down and studied the book.
"Why so many plastic bags?" He asked.
"I was afraid if it started to dry out, it might ruin it."
"I can dry it out with my vacuum drier, but I won't know the condition of the pages until I take a look to see how extensive the restoration will be…if I can restore it at all."
He raised the glasses and looked at her. His slate gray eyes looked worn and tired. He had dark circles, droopy cheeks and eyebrows a decade overdue for a trim.
"And how long do you think this will take?" She tried not to sound eager.
"If everything goes well, three or four days."
"And if it doesn't?" She asked.
"I only have one other project right now." He pointed to the book on the table. "So I can give this book a lot of attention. No more than a week, I'd say."
"And the cost?" Regan smiled.
"I'm old Ms Regan. I don't need the money. I do this because I enjoy it and want to stay busy. If I sat around here every day with my thumb up my ass, I'd probably die in a couple of months. Zula Mae…" DeLoach pointed to the door. "…Nosy woman but she takes good care of the house which leaves me time to do this. I'll only charge you what it costs me — basically chemicals, electricity, and supplies. To do this right, you're looking at around five or six hundred dollars, payable in cash, before you get the book back. Those are my terms and as you can probably guess, I'm quite inflexible. But rest assured, the restoration will be done properly."
"That sounds more than reasonable. Quite frankly, I expected to pay more." She smiled again at the old man. "I can't imagine why my uncle put this book in the freezer. He moved to the States in his twenties. I'm hoping it has my family history in it, which is something I'd like to know more about."
"I understand, Ms Regan." DeLoach paused.
"Please, call me Ashley." She tried to look calm. Had his suspicions already been raised? Was her story not convincing enough?
"Very well, Ashley, a word of caution. Family is important. Roots are important. But I have lived long enough to know that all families have secrets. Some with dark secrets. I hope your uncle's book does not alarm or disappoint you."
"My uncle was an eccentric old man. My parents thought he was crazy, but as a kid, I thought he was neat." She paused. "There's no telling what's in that book."
"As long as you're prepared."
"Nothing about my uncle or his life would surprise me." She shifted the subject back to the old man. "The librarian at the college told me you're an expert, how long have you been doing these types of restorations?"
"Over fifty years of document restoration and thirty years of genealogical studies."
"Genealogy?"
"Yes. I used to teach a course at the university," he paused, "until they decided I was too old."
"Nonsense. I can't believe they would waste your knowledge and experience."
DeLoach stared at Regan. "They wanted new blood. Someone younger, someone more in touch with the digital age, they said. I taught the old school methods of research in libraries and courthouses with a small amount of emphasis on the use of the Internet. They claimed they wanted it the other way around. I think they just wanted to pay a smaller salary."